Scientists at the University of the West of England have designed a potentially autonomous robot which feeds on flies attracted by human excrement and uses them to generate electricity, the New Scientist reports.

P2P company Altnet has instigated legal action against the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA), claiming the music trade body and other anti-piracy operatives have infringed its intellectual property.

Unsurprisingly, Oracle has announced a whole bunch of new products at Oracle OpenWorld this week. Some of these, like the new version of 11i, will get lots of media attention. One that will not is the new release of Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB), code-named Paris. However, in its own right it is pretty significant and it merits some serious consideration.

A 44-year-old German man has been jailed for three-and-a-half years for trying to extort money by running a bomb hoax scam. The man - who used the aliases Jonathan Drake and Vincent Baxter - sent out 39 emails to companies in Germany and Austria, threatening to blow up buildings or kill people unless he was paid.

When Microsoft announced victory in its battle with open source for the hearts, minds and wallets of Newham council last month, the press naturally asked to see the report Newham's decision was allegedly based on. Er, yes, the report would be forthcoming, we were told. So we gave it a few days, and asked again. And again. And again. But mysteriously, although Microsoft executives are prepared to shout from the rafters about what's in the report, the report itself never seems to arrive.

Four in ten net users in the US have broadband at home, according to research from Harris Interactive. Its survey of 2,003 adults also found that the use of broadband and narrowband net access is also on the up.

The scientist who pioneered DNA fingerprinting has warned of the increasing danger of false positives as the use of the technique becomes more widespread. Although the theoretical chance of a false ID remains very small, geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys suggests switching from use of ten markers per person to 15 or 16 would reduce the chance of a false match to around one in a trillion.

AnalysisFierce competition in the corporate and public sectors means mobile operators are under constant price pressure as they bid to steal each others’ lunch. This has resulted in a trend towards lower voice tariffs which is likely to continue. Mobile data services in the form of GPRS and 3G connectivity represent an opportunity to make up the shortfall and to recoup some of the investment operators have made in wireless data licences and infrastructure.

Savvis, the big US corporate ISP, is to remove spammers from its books following pressure from anti-spam group Spamhaus. The pledge comes after a whistleblower, who had failed to persuade Savvis' management to put its house in order, was fired.

The Scottish Parliament has had what you might call an 'attack of the Jimmehs' by including Scots in the minority languages it supports on its Web site. But although pages pages like this will have a regrettable tendency to engender the response, "Youse takin the piss, Jimmeh?", we at The Register should stress before the flames start that we view the initiative as a serious and worthwhile exercise.

Internet travel outfit - Ebookers - has confirmed that it is in talks with "several interested parties" to sell the company. Industry whispers reckon that Lastminute.com and the outfits behind Expedia and Travelocity could be sniffing round to snap up Ebookers.

Nokia has revised its earnings guidance upwards, and now says it expects to report both higher income and higher volumes shipped than it previously stated when it delivers its Q3 2004 figures next month.

Qualcomm is clearly thinking beyond the phone. The CDMA pioneer made a significant acquisition today, snapping up a San Francisco-based designer of light-modulated displays. Iridigm will cost Qualcomm $170 million. The former's iMoD, or Interferometric Modulator next-generation displays draw on from ambient light, and so consumer much less power than conventional TFTs. Currently LCD manufacturing processes and materials are used in the manufacture of iMoD displays - they use glass, like today's LCDs - but eventually, Iridigm reckons, iMoDs will be manufacturered using cheaper materials such as plastic. This will permit higher resolutions and cheap custom shapes to be ordered.

At the height of the dot.com IPO mania he helped create, investment banker Frank Quattrone's worries included the public flotations of companies like Cisco, Amazon.com and Netscape. Now his main worry will be dropping the soap in the showers.

IDF Fall '04The internet needs an upgrade if it is to keep pace with a growing population, provide the bandwidth for increasingly demanding applications and protect mission critical systems, Intel said today.